chemical ali is dead

It's an unconfirmed AP report. If that's true, then good riddance.

Edit: Nothing to do with the US. British troops were involved. Apparently the security services knew that he was in a certain building which then got shelled.

Well then it just goes to show you how good the British special forces are.

God save the Queen!

Cool, so the Brits sent in James Bond, but we're sending in James Brown.

Yeah but it was the US air strike that killed him. Though the Brits confirmed it. Good team work.

CHAUCHESKU WAS DEAD!
There's life outside the troth people!

Interesting to see you guys bickering about who killed him.
I thought we were trying to get some of the leaders to bring them to justice, that is to the ICC or something. But perhaps it is easier to just be very brave and fly a F/A-18 with a bunkerbuster and get it over with.

Justice or not, the world will be a better place without him.

FYI:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast....ali/index.html

From that CNN link above:

"Al-Majeed, who was in his 50s, led a campaign against rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988 in which entire villages were wiped out. An estimated 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed."

Definitely justified.

Next: Saddam.

First of all, the ICC has no retroactive jurisdiction. So it couldn't have indicted him for nerge gassing civilians. Secondly, he was a high-ranking military officer, which made him a legitimate military target under the laws of war.

And Optimus Prime

But I'm sure some humanrights court should have. My point was that even if it was "justified" it shows that we have no interest in getting these men alive. The reason.... Perhaps because these men could bring up some ugly facts about the western support they got while murdering Kurds and Iranians. I'm not stating this as fact, I'm just speculating. I'm tired of this rightousness we are showing now because of what the Iraqis did back in the 80's. We supported them at that time, we did absolutly nothing to help the Kurds at that time, so why now? Why the sudden rush when we did absolutly nothing to help the victims of Halabja and in fact some tried to pin it at the Iranians? Do you really think the Kurds like the US&UK and other western nations?

One last question. Would W be a legitimate military target since he is commander-in-chief(or something like that)?

1) There was never any doubt that we were going to take these people out. There wasn't talk of capture. At any point in the "official" discussions that we heard.

2) Yes, GW would be a legitimate target as the commander-in-chief. That's one of the reasons targeting leaders has never been in vogue.

What other human rights court? The ICC is it. The other ones in the Hague are special courts of limited jurisdiction set up by the Security Council. One deals only with Rwanda, the other only with the Balkans. It's possible that after the war there will be some kind of Nuremberg-style war crimes trials. Bush has said as much. But remember, Nuremberg was purely victor's justice.

Your second question is hotly debated. The president of the United States is the Commander-in-Chief, and some argue that would make him a legitimate military target in a time of war. On the other hand, he is clearly considered a civilian political leader under US domestic law. I've seen arguments go both ways and I don't think that any firm conclusion has ever been reached. In the mean time, I'm sure the Secret Service is being quite careful and unlike Baghdad, there aren't any tanks driving around our presidential grounds.

Incidentally, I seem to recall reading that during WW-II people started advising Churchill to be careful because his habit of wearing an RAF uniform could be construed as turning him into a legitimate military target. So this isn't a new issue.

All this hoo-hah about 'Chemical Ali' is just another example of the administration selling this conflict to the masses. It's insufficient for CNN to be reporting the capture/death/pursuit of yet another hyphenated middle-eastern name that's indistinguishable to all the rest. But this guy, look at him, he's super-dangerous, he's Chemical Ali (TM) with his anthrax gun and ricin grenades. They may as well have called him Dr. Doom, or the Green Goblin.

They call him 'Chemical' and America believes them. They're going to find chemical weapons, because how can they not? They're there, we're here, they'll find what they're looking for, whether or not it really exists, because embedded reporters or no, they control the information. The fact that we've gobbled up the story about this Ali fellow just proves to them that they can get away with it.

The call him "chemical" because he planned and executed the nerve gassing of Kurdish civilians in 1988. Do you deny that happened?

It's actually the name he was known as to the Iraqis themselves. While nobody would have ever said so in public the gas attacks against the Kurds, and who was responsible for them, were common knowledge in Iraq.

ROFL!

I'll agree with you that this is a lot about PR. After all, it's not he himself who is dangerous--he just gave the orders that others carried out. That makes him a murderer and a criminal, but he's still just a fat old man sitting in an office somewhere.

They do the same thing with OBL. This 60 year old guy tethered to a dialysis machine is suppossed to keep you up at night.

Fear is a powerful tool.

At any rate, I won't shed any tears for Ali. He was a sicko. I would have preferred that he stand trial somewhere (so we can also find out who else was complicit in his crimes), but I'm not bummed that he's dead. Not by a long shot.

you might want to pay a little better attention to the news

Can't say I'm going to miss him. It will be interesting how the left plays off the chemical weapons when they are found. Of course they'll claim we planted them there.

But then again, some people also believe that if you wear a tinfoil hat, the Aliens can't read your mind.

What? They've still been reading my thoughts? But I've been using the heavy-duty reynold's aluminal foil. Two layers!

**thinks to himself** He like aliens. Aliens are good. Keep moving, nothing to see here. Cows turn themselves inside out all the time.

To avoid being confused with a propagandist, might I recommend not using the term "left" to describe those skeptical of preliminary reports.

Even Rumsfeld belittled reporters who asked about it today.

And just to rehash the truth of the WMD debate (rather than the ridiculous rhetoric), it was a question of threat, not a question of existence.

We know what they had. We know what was destroyed. What we don't know is what happened to the stuff we already know wasn't destroyed and what might be new. This is where things are very very clear and why UN 1441 was unanimous.

The question of threat (which includes intent) is highly susceptible to debate. Some felt there was imminent threat. Others did not.

Finding what we already knew existed doesn't prove threat.

Not that it matters any more. I'm just tired of hearing the same mischaracterizations and fallacies repeated.

Hmm, a question of threat huh?

How about allowing a man who we already has made attempts to assassinate an ex US president, someone who shows that he has already used it.


I think we'll be seeing lot of change in the stance from the Antiwar crowd from "no proof of WMD" to no "proof of threat from WMD" in the next few weaks as they attempt to shore up their rapidly eroding position.

My point is that this was the actual debate at the UN and in most literate circles. Whether or not the talking heads on Fox News or CNN said "they think Saddam has no weapons and love him and hate America" makes no difference.

Where it might get confusing is how the term "WMD" is used. In many circles, the term does not apply to chem/bio/radio agents, per se. It is reserved for when those agents are combined with delivery systems, particularly delivery systems that can cover great distances.

Everyone at the UN agreed that Iraq was in possession of materials in breach of their agreements or at least that they had not proved the absence of these materials. That is why UN 1441 was unanimous.

The disagreement was whether or not the level of threat posed by Iraq justified a pre-emptive invasion and occupation.

Again, there is a difference between the actual debate and how the debate was characterized by various parties with an agenda.

Some people would always rather shout, "Hey, they hate America and love Hitler" than shout "Hey, they disagree that there is only one way to handle this problem and refuse to negotiate an alternate method".

At any rate, the point is long past. It only matters to people who are still trying to justify our actions to themselves or others. I, for one, think it's too late to tell ourselves it was the right thing or even the only thing we could have done. It doesn't matter now.

Now we have to focus on doing the right things to prevent Iraq from becoming like Afghanistan or Palestine or just slipping back into another form of tyranny once the coalition forces leave.

Confirmed! You (crowd) haven't been listening � been on SOS (Stuck on Send) mode for months.

Go back and read what TF, myself, and various others have been saying. This isn't a shift in our stance. The finding will only clarify the real issue at the heart of this.


You will find that we have always said they have chemical/biological agents (though there has been debate on the weaponization of said agents, most of us believed they had that covered too). We have said from the get-go that there is a lot of room between the "status-quo" inspections and "Blow 'em up" stalemate. Some of us even gave suggestions. I brought up the Carnegie Mellon policy of co-ercive inspections, for example.

It's all on record if you care to go back through the archive.

You're right of course, and i knew that he was a Bad Man when i wrote that, and didn't make my point well. The point isn't whether or not this guy is or is not a bad man. The point is that now that he has been given this epithet (or at least publicized with it), he has become an easily digestible news story, which is the entire point here, not whether or not this guy represents any kind of threat to us today.

And it's true that those of us who oppose this war will have some retreating to do in the event that chemical weapons are indeed found. Remember, however, there is an entire spectrum of reasons to despise this war, and that a disbelief of the existence of chemical weapons is but one of them (and far from the top of my list, personally). But regardless of what reasons we hated this war, that will probably be enough cause for many pro-war folks to give us the I Told You So Dance. And though it will nauseate me, i will have to accept it, as the inevitable result of taking a position against something that is essentially preordained.

The thing about this 'Chemical Ali' guy, is that mentions of him, along with the copious 'maybe we found some' episodes slowly wears down the skepticism of the public, so that by the time they finally say 'we really found some', the public's not going to need much convincing. i, for one, will need some convincing, because i simply do not trust our government to tell the truth.